The present disclosure relates generally to access control systems, and more particularly, to a system and a method of opening a lock with virtual card data on a mobile device.
An access control system is typically operated by encoding data on a physical key card that indicates access rights. Some access control systems are online where the reader can use some means to communicate with the access control system. In online systems the access rights are usually a reference identifier. Other access control systems are offline and the access rights are encoded as data that can be decoded and interpreted by the offline lock to retrieve the access rights. An example is a hotel locking system where a front desk encodes a guest card and an offline, battery powered lock on a guest room door has the means to decode the card and permit or deny access based on the encoded access rights. Some methods of encoding access rights include sequencing where subsequent access rights have a sequence number that is greater than the prior access rights.
Some access control systems have utilized a device other than a physical key card to communicate with a lock, such as via audio tones from a mobile device, where there is also a separate method of indicating access rights that is different from the data on the key card. Such systems are partially effective in that a person can open the lock by either means. But because of the separate means for indicating access rights where the lock can not determine which access right was sequenced before the other access right, these systems do not allow use of the ubiquitous physical key card in conjunction with the mobile device. The advantage of using the virtual card data is that no synchronization is required between separate systems for indicating access rights, and the lock can have a unified audit trail.